Will this be a year of real change? “Never underestimate the power of human ingenuity,” writes David Brooks in the New York Times. What does that mean for your brand and communications?

A new year of possibility is ahead.

As designers and design educators we are excited to celebrate the new year by recognizing the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus, the German art school founded by Walter Gropius in 1919. The Bauhaus taught us how to think about design.

Design can inform

Design can provoke

Design can persuade

Design can educate

Less and More about the Bauhaus.

Perhaps you’ve heard of “Less is More?” This philosophy, which is the notion that simplicity and clarity lead to good design, was espoused by Bauhaus instructor Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It is one of the cornerstones of the Bauhaus and the modern design movement.

The Bauhaus, which means “School of Building,” was a German design school that opened in 1919. It operated between the World Wars for only 14 years with 33 faculty and 1,250 students. And yet in such a short time the Bauhaus changed what it meant to be a designer.

The school focused on the connection between theory and practice with a curriculum that integrated many aspects of design, from architecture to ceramics to industrial arts. At the time, it was a radical idea, but today it is the structure for many design education programs in many countries.

Bauhaus masters included such luminaries as Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Marianne Brandt, Marcel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, and Mies van der Rohe. Once WWII started many of the Bauhaus masters fled to the USA and taught at Black Mountain College in NC, Chicago University, Harvard and Yale, among others. Josef Albers moved to Yale where he taught Sewell Sillman who eventually taught color theory to me at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Bauhaus instructor Paul Klee said, “Art does not reproduce the visible but makes it visible.” Now that’s the power of graphic design messaging and visual communication!

Keep an open mind in 2019.